national cable modem or dsl company?

[cleofus1]

both (yes all two of them) of my phone companies has extremely shitty service...are there any national cable or dsl isp's that are worth a shit? in other words very fast reasonably priced and great customer service?

[bemildred]

1. I don't know any nationals whose service does not suck.

That requires actual people and Amurkin business does not
like to pay underlings well. Usually "service" is some poor
overworked slob on-call or doing his third "job" to get by,
or a recording, or some bright, chipper fellow in Asia
following a script. I did once get rather good service from
Mindspring after spending a certain amount of time on the
phone and threatening to quit, got "escalated" to someone with
a brain and actual power to fix things. But it was not a
technical issue.

Lots of reviews here:

http://www.epinions.com/cmsw-ISP-All-DSL

Be warned that providers do plant good reviews for themselves.
It's a "marketing tool".

[welshTerrier2]

2. verizon dsl

i have verizon dsl and i've been very happy with it ... it costs me $29.95 a month ...

since i got the service, they've gone from download speeds of 768 kbs to 1.5 mbs to 3.0 mbs at no extra charge to me ...

the service has never gone down ...

one thing you might think about, though, is that if your phonelines are old or poorly maintained, that could have a negative effect on the quality of your dsl service ... if that's the case, you might be better off going with a cable modem ...

i went with dsl instead of cable because cable was more than $60 a month because i am NOT a cable subscriber; i have satellite TV ... cable is generally a little faster than dsl but i don't think the difference is significant ...

check out this website for info and reviews: www.dslReports.com

[RoyGBiv]

3. Differences ...

The differences can be significant depending on a lot of factors, particularly the one you mention about the quality of phone lines. You could have fiber all the way to your NIU (network interface unit) and still have crappy DSL service if the lines inside the house are more than five years old. They simply weren't made to carry that kind of bandwidth.

The local SBC is now advertising 3Mb DSL service. I've been in several people's houses that are paying for this level of service and tested their speed, and I have yet to find one that even approaches that. Most are still getting less than 1.5 on average.

The "average" is important. All broadband providers, be they cable, DSL, or otherwise, advertise their speeds based on a daily average. Cable broadband tends to have more consistent speeds whereas DSL tends to fluctuate more during peak usage times.

For the original poster, my advice would be to shop around but not to base the decision entirely on price. Some DSL providers give you a great deal on the DSL service, but you do also have to have a phone line, and often they require you to have a high level of phone service to get the good price on the DSL. Without knowing the specific companies or region in this case, it would be hard to know precisely what's better.

[welshTerrier2]

4. download speeds

is there a reliable way for me to test my "average" download speed ...

i've been using the following website to run tests: http://performance.toast.net/

fwiw, when i check the "F-16 Jets" radio button, i average between 2100 and 2300 KB/s ...

[RoyGBiv]

5. That's a good one ...

The problem with it is that the measurement is based on downloading a single file, with or without text, from various individual servers. That's fine for testing your speed downloading a single file, but does not accurately reflect typical behavior for web browsing. You hit a website like DU, and you're not downloading one file. You're downloading the HTML for the page itself, along with all the graphics linked to it as well as any links (web ads) to which it points, etc. This can conceivably mean dozens of independent hits for a single hit on a site and can slow things down significantly.

One site I use to demonstrate variances in speed and to show typical behavior is this:

http://www.numion.com/

There are several different kinds of tests there. The YourSpeed test is excellent for measuring your effective browsing speed to a specific country or the world. It grabs numerous small graphics from several sites repeatedly for however long you tell it to do so. The longer you let it go, the better the measurement is. This mimics the behavior of hitting a typical website that pushes sometimes dozens of links at you all at the same time.

You can also test speed to specific sites, which I find very helpful when I think my connection is messed up. Turns out it is usually just certain sites that are having a problem, and if I am bored enough to trace it, it all goes to a particular set of hubs.

To get a reliable average speed, you need to allow the site to set a cookie, allow javascript of course, and take several YourSpeed tests within the US at periodic intervals over several days. (Don't always do it at the same time of day.) The site will keep track for you and tell you how you measure against others also taking the test.

On a slight tangent, another test there called StopWatch is useful for comparing browsers. You enter a URL, and it times how long it takes your browser to render the page. The browser you use can actually affect your perceived performance because it may render one site slower than another browser would. I did this when trying to choose between Opera and Firefox as my browser. (There was no signifiant difference for the sites I frequent, so I went with the OpenSource.) IE fell far behind hitting almost every site but those with ActiveX or that were optimized specifically for IE, iow non-standard sites that I don't frequent anyway.

FWIW, anything above 2.0 is good for a 3MB connection. I have a 4MB cable connection, and I got anywhere from 3.2 to 3.5 using the test you mentioned. If I were downloading one, very large file, I would get around 4.5 to 5MB. This is how marketing for broadband providers determine their averages.

This is probably a longer answer than you wanted. :-)